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New Library Comics

Now that the Newly Catalog Items feature is working again on the library's Website, I can easily share the list of new comics that the library is getting in for our collection.

Here is the listing of new comics & GNs added to the catalog over the past four weeks.

Assuming there's any interest, I'll probably continue to generate a list either every week or every other week.

Quick Manga Reviews

Club 9, vol. 1
by Makoto Kobayashi
Club 9 is the story of Haruo Hattori, a cute but klutzy country bumpkin who comes to Tokyo to attend college and ends up working as a ginza at Club 9, the hottest hostess bar in the city. Kobayashi imbues Haruo with a charming combination of naivete and pluckish enthusiam, making her a likable character. The ginza profession is made to seem glamourous and exciting, though one suspects that the reality is far from that, as putting up with the leering and pawing of middle-aged leches is something that most girls would do only for the money. However, Kobayashi does take advantage of the scenes in Club 9 to poke fun at manga-ka, even including an analogue of himself as a drunken lout. The art is strong--better, I think, than in Kobayashi's What's Michael--the backgrounds are well-detailed, the storytelling flows nicely, and Kobayashi knows how to draw attractive women with realistic proportions. I find his faces though to be overly cartoony; they work well in a gag strip like What's Michael, but they seem out-of-place amidst the more reliastic suroundings here. I'm also put off a bit by the translation, specifically the dialect given to Harou which reads like she is an American back-woods hick. I know the effect they were going for, but it comes off like a low-rent Daisy Duke.
Rating: 3 (of 5)


IWGP, vol. 1
by Ira Ishida & Sena Aritou
Take one part young adult drama, one part sex farce, one part detectice story and one part gang comic, mix them all together, and you may get something like IWGP. Based on a popular novel (that also spawned a Japanese television series) IWGP tells the story of a group of young adults who meet in Ikebukuro West Gate Park on New Year's Eve at the turn of the millennium, then follows them as the flirt, fall in love, have sex, and get imbroiled in the case of a serial killer who rapes and strangles escorts. There's sex, violence and melodrama, all in nearly equal amounts (at at times rather graphic), and the various elements of the story don't ever quite mesh together; it's as though there are three different types of stories being told, all vying for the limelight. Still, despite the fact that it really shouldn't work, I find myself drawn to the characters. The art is 'standard manga' style, but manages to keep the various characters delineated and tell the story clearly, even as Aritou changes his style around slightly depending on the mood of the story at a particular point. It's all a bit of an uneven package, but it's better than I thought it would be.
Rating: 2.5 (of 5)


(A review copy of IWGP was provided by the publisher.)

Monkey Covers

Sunday is Monkey Covers day here at YACB. Because there's nothing better than a comic with a monkey on the cover.

Today's cover is by Scott McCloud, from 1987's Zot! #16, in which the entire cast gets devolved into monkeys. Great Fun!

Image is courtesy of the GCD. Click on the image for a larger version.

More Lieber

Here's a more recent piece by Steve Lieber, "$209 Round Trip," a two-page remembrance of his father:

page 1 - page 2

(link via Johanna, who also makes some nice observations)

Steve Lieber's IPL Blast from the Past

Continuing on our IPL Birthday theme, here's a very rare Steve Lieber cartoon that appeared in the IPL's one-time newsletter for kids, WebINK, back in 1997:

Happy Birthday, IPL!

On March 17, 1995, the Internet Public Library opened its virtual doors to the world.

In early January of that year, a group of thirty or so graduate students at the University of Michigan School of Information and Library Studies gathered in a room and launched their plan to create a public library for the Internet community. Ten short weeks later that dream became a reality, and now ten years later the IPL continues.

I was proud to be one of those thirty students who created the IPL, and after the class I continued to work on the IPL project for seven years, spending the last 3.5 of those years as the Director. During that time I had the privilige to work with scores of talented students on the project. I have now continued on my career away from the IPL, but I look back on those days fondly and continue to be impressed by the work of those who continue what we began a decade ago.

So Happy Birthday, IPL--here's to at least ten more!